In a wireless communication system, a base station sends data and control information to a user equipment UE (User Equipment) in a downlink, and receives data and control information from the user equipment in an uplink. Similarly, the user equipment transfers data and control information to the base station in the uplink, and receives data and control information from the base station in the downlink. The base station can communicate with the UE in TDD mode. In a TDD wireless communication system, downlink transmission and uplink transmission use a same carrier, but are conducted in different time slots (or subframes). That is to say, the downlink transmission and the uplink transmission are conducted in time division multiplexing mode. An advantage of the TDD is that an uplink subframe and a downlink subframe can be configured flexibly, so that the system accommodates service change requirements of uplink-downlink data transmission. For example, with the increase of uplink data amount, the base station can allocate more time slot resources to the uplink; with the decrease of uplink data amount, the base station can reduce the time slot resources used by the uplink.
In the TDD wireless communication system of long term evolution LTE (Long Term Evolution)/long term evolution-advanced LTE-A (LTE Advanced), each radio frame includes 10 subframes. Basing on service applications of a subframe, the subframe may be a downlink subframe, an uplink subframe or a special subframe. The base station notifies the uplink-downlink subframe configuration to the UE in a system message; after obtaining the uplink-downlink subframe configuration, the UE obtains a type of each of the subframes within each radio frame.
To improve the performance and flexibility of the LTE/LTE-A TDD system, the base station adjusts the uplink-downlink subframe configuration of the system dynamically. For UEs that can only determine the uplink-downlink subframe configuration according to the system message, for example, UEs in LTE Version 8/9/10 (Release 8/9/10), the system message is semi-statically updated, and the update period of the system message is long. Therefore, if a dynamic adjustment is conducted by the base station in the uplink-downlink subframe configuration, the UEs cannot obtain, in real-time, the uplink-downlink subframe configuration that is dynamically adjusted by the base station, and will receive and transmit data according to the uplink-downlink subframe configuration determined from the system message. Consequently, the dynamic adjustment conducted by the base station in the uplink-downlink subframe configuration may result that the UE cannot communicate with the base station normally.